Modem chips for modern communication standards, for example mobile communication standards such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) become increasingly complex. In particular the on-chip memory size increases with the peak data rates provided by the respective standard (e.g. up to 600 Mbps for the latest releases of LTE). On the other hand the progress of silicon process technology continuously increases the on-chip memory density. Therefore, chips become more and more susceptible to intermittent or persistent memory failures occurring during their life time. Depending on the criticality of memory errors more or less complex countermeasures can be taken, ranging from no protection at all or repair of non-functional memory instances during factory test to full-blown real-time error correction coding (ECC) for each memory cell.
Methods and devices employed in data communication networks constantly have to be improved. In particular, it may be desirable to improve the error protection of the modem, in particular the modem of the mobile device in situations as described above.